Advertising and other kinds of messaging are typically presented in forms that use “vertical space”: that is, billboards, walls, ceiling-mounted displays, and the like. On the other hand, one kind of space that has great potential for advertising and messaging, but has been largely overlooked, is floor space, which may be characterized as “horizontal space.”
There have been efforts to exploit floor space for advertising. Adhesive (i.e., “stick-on”) floor decals are known. Such decals may include a colorful image and convey some kind of advertising message, such as “Drink Coke”. Such an advertising medium is limited, however, by the fact that the message is static and not easily changed. On the other hand, U.S. Pat. No. 6,417,778, which is fully incorporated herein by reference, describes a modifiable electronic display associated with a floor that enables images and text to be easily changed, allowing an advertising message to be quickly adaptable and efficiently targeted toward desired customers.
However, there remain challenges to effectively and efficiently communicating to an audience by displayed visual advertising or messaging on the floor or ground. Among these challenges is how to orient the content of a display for easy viewing and comprehension. In vertical space, by contrast, challenges relating to image orientation are not usually presented. For example, when a person views a computer monitor or television set, the image displayed is almost always “right side up” from the perspective of the viewer, since people, for the most part, orient themselves with their feet on the ground and their heads in the air. Thus, similarly, images in advertising and messaging in vertical space are almost always right side up with respect to a viewer.
On the other hand, when an image is in horizontal space, problems relating to the orientation of the image may be presented. For example, an image that is on a floor and co-planar with the floor may be approached or viewed from any number of different directions. Depending on the direction of approach of a viewer, the image may be right side up, upside down, sideways, or otherwise skewed in any direction from the perspective of the viewer. More specifically, suppose an image on the floor is oriented to be easily seen and understood by viewers walking north (e.g., right side up with respect to these viewers). This image will be upside down and therefore largely unintelligible to viewers walking south. Similarly, suppose an image on the floor is oriented to be right side up to viewers walking west—the same image will be upside down to viewers walking east.
Such considerations may be further complicated by observing how differences in language affect image presentation. For example, although English text is read from left to right and top to bottom, in that order, in Asian languages such as Japanese, text is read from top to bottom in columns in a left-to-right progression of columns. In Israel text is read from right to left.